With the popularization of smart devices, a growing number of cooperative applications exist among multiple smart devices. For example, multiple smartphones access a social network or a local area network for music sharing, and each smartphone plays same content, achieving a louder sound playback effect; or each smartphone plays a different sound channel of music, bringing stereo music enjoyment; or the multiple smartphones share a video and play the video synchronously to achieve synchronous experience. All these require playback synchronization among the multiple smart devices.
In the prior art, a clock server sends a synchronization clock to each smart device, which requires synchronous playback, for time alignment so as to ensure that a clock of each smart device is synchronized, thereby achieving synchronous playback by multiple smart devices.
However, for the method in the prior art, although clock synchronization is performed, due to different hardware performance of smart devices of different types, video decoding speeds may be different; and a difference in precision of audio and video synchronization control may cause a frame level to be unsynchronized, when a video or audio of each device displays a same frame. As a result, a synchronization effect among the smart devices is poor.